War Tax Resistance in the Friends Journal in 1962

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
1962

An odd article leading off the 1 April
issue begins: “It is timely to remind Friends that during the first third of
our almost three centuries in America Friends did not pay taxes; nor were they
taxed.” The author, Godfrey Klinger, quotes a historian about the aversion of
the settlers in Pennsylvania — both the Quakers and the later Dutch and
Germans — to being taxed. But Klinger seems to me to be sort of dancing around
the topic of Quakers and their proper response to war taxes without ever
mentioning it directly. His concluding paragraph says:

It was only after the Quakers in the [Pennsylvania colonial] Assembly
permitted themselves to be influenced by the dire predictions of the
warmongers, whose real aim was to rob the Indians of their land, that taxes
and conscription were imposed and much-needed capital wasted on the tools of
war, a crime which, in the next two hundred years, was to reach today’s
proportions of half of every man’s labor and self-respect.

In the same issue, Guy W. Solt penned an article on “Friends and Their Money”
in which he asked “whether there is virtue in accumulating more money than we
expect to use in our lifetime.” Among the reasons he thinks Quakers should
find wealth-accumulation to be suspect is this:

Federal and state taxes consume a large portion of our income. In general,
the more wealth we have, the more taxes we pay. The portion of our federal
taxes used for military purposes is 80 per cent, or more. This portion is
very problematic for some Friends who oppose militarism, because if they
refuse to pay the portion of federal taxes used for military purposes, they
may be penalized and pay far more than the regular tax. Some Friends resent
taxes because of government waste. Regardless of our attitude toward taxes,
the fact remains that Friends are responsible for a part of their tax problem
if they retain more money than is needed during their lifetime. We pay taxes
on the value of our property in addition to the income from it.

An opening editorial in the 1 June issue
on the subject of “Direct Action,” asked, in passing: “Does the refusal to pay
taxes still deserve the name of direct action when the objector has a bank
deposit waiting to be confiscated?”

A later article in the same issue, on the subject of peace activists in
England, noted: “Tax refusal is difficult for us, for, if we earn, we have tax
deducted before we are paid. Some of us asked to be transferred to another
schedule so that we might withhold tax and send the equivalent to the World
Health Organization or another good cause, but we were informed that this was
not permitted.”

A report in the 1 August issue on the
“round tables” that had taken place at the Friends General Conference in New
Jersey in June, mentioned a round table
discussion on “The Visible Witness: Friends and Direct-Action Projects” at
which it was noted that “Avoiding a martyr complex is important. Vigils and
tax refusals as the most conspicuous witness were discussed.”

All of these mentions are conspicuously incidental: brief surfacings of
war tax resistance in the context of a discussion of something else.

In “‘A Place to Stand In’” in the 1
December issue, Mildred Binns Young cast a suspicious eye on the
middle-class ordinariness of the current Society of Friends, when contrasted
to the crucible of sufferings in which the Society had been born. “If friends
are now indistinguishable [from any other class of quiet, honorable,
successful, comfortable, and useful citizens], is it because all the causes
for which we had to stand have been won, as the right to silent worship or the
right to affirm in court have been won?” Indeed not, she says — “we are living
in a time when things are as wrong as they were when Christians were being
thrown to lions, and as wrong as they were when Friends for years together
were lying by hundreds in filthy dungeons. Where now are the Christians, and
where the Friends, prepared to suffer in resistance to these wrongs rather
than to acquiesce in them?” Specifically:

Where are the Friends who refuse to pay the taxes that go to build the
armaments we abhor, as early Friends refused to pay the tithes that supported
an ecclesiastical establishment they abhorred?

A few Friends do refuse, mostly Friends with such small taxes to pay that the
government can afford to ignore them; and many Friends pay the taxes, but
with sorrow. Recently I saw a letter from a young man who had served a prison
term for refusing to register for the draft after the Second World War. He
had chosen his present job with great care, putting aside more lucrative
offers to keep as free as possible from war-making. But his letter says
wryly: “I have just solemnized my contract to give the government $600 toward
war-making.” He meant he had just signed and filed his income tax report.
What if all the young Quaker heads of families in America had been refusing
to file for this tax? What if all the older, even the wealthiest, Quaker
heads of families had been refusing it? What if we had been prepared, as the
early Friends were, to pool resources in order to take care of the families
of men who lost their jobs or their land, or were imprisoned?

Friends never have failed to make it clear that, officially and as a body,
they refuse to recognize war or other violence as a legitimate means of
settling disputes among nations or individuals. But what about our tacit
consent to an economic system that thrives on war preparation and has not
learned to exist without it? What about our easygoing participation in — nay,
our prosperity within — an economic system that, to hold its own,
trades in death, manufacturing the capability to destroy all that we love,
and brandishing this capability of destruction as irresponsibly as a boy
brandishes a stick with a nail in it?

Granted that there no longer exists any way to refuse all complicity in this
system and continue to live, how often do we consider accepting only simple
subsistence from it — laying up no treasure from it, refusing to operate in
it to our own advantage? As long as we are living well on it, we are not
likely to be fully committed to changing it; we talk of peace, and sometimes
we talk hopefully of it, while we know that peace is no lid that can be
applied over a seething volcano, no plaster to lay over a festering abscess.

And with this, no longer was the coverage of war tax resistance in the
Friends Journal the sympathetic coverage of fringe
(and largely non-Quaker) activists, or the solemn and sorrowful contemplation
of taxpayer complicity. The gauntlet has been thrown, and now Quakers need to
declare where they stand and what they plan to do about it.

(It’s worth noting that Young was on the Board of Managers of the
Friends Journal at the time, and so was
well-positioned to light a fire under its coverage of, and practice of,
confrontational Quaker activism.)

Baltimore Yearly Meetings

The Baltimore Yearly Meetings seem to have had a burst of interest in war tax
resistance around this time, and an article in the
1 October issue gives the credit to
“Mildred Binns Young’s lecture” (which I believe the just-quoted article above
was based on).

One “concern” expressed at the Joint Meetings for Business of the Baltimore
Yearly Meetings in August “advised all
member Monthly Meetings to consider the responsibilities of Friends in paying
or refusing to pay their taxes, now that much of our government’s funds is
spent on violence, and to consider the Meeting’s possible response to the
needs of Friends and their families if individuals conscientiously refuse to
pay.”

The 15 December issue reported the results
of a survey of 350 adult members of the Baltimore Yearly Meetings concerning
the peace testimony, and bemoaned “the lack of responsible feeling about
personal financial policy, something that it would seem most persons could
consider with little extra effort.”

Less than 60 per cent would refuse to invest in arms production. Only a
little over half would prefer their tax money to be used for nonmilitary
purposes. Only two or three would go so far as to undertake the difficult
course of refusing tax payment on this account. It is encouraging that not
far from half would be willing to tax themselves in some degree for support
of the United Nations. (This has been a growing concern, judging by the
increase in such contributions.)

Drifting a bit from 1962 to keep this line of
thought intact, I find in a future issue a calendar notice for a
23 February 1963 “Open panel discussion on
tax refusal… sponsored by Baltimore Yearly Meetings Joint Peace Committee”
featuring the speakers “Jesse Yaukey, Lawrence Scott, and Oliver Stone.”

Remembering Quaker history

In the 1 March issue, LaVerne Hill Forbush
looked back at “Suffering of Friends in Maryland,
1658–1810” and noted that
between 1744 and 1810 there were 296 cases
of Friends suffering fines in one region, 34 “for refusal to pay priest’s
wages, [but] the greater number of fines had to do with military assessments,
under such headings as refusal to go to war, refusal to muster, refusal to
sign association papers or join the militia. War taxes were doubled or trebled
when Friends refused to pay them.”

In the article that recounted the results of the survey of Baltimore Yearly
Meetings members, the author spent some time recounting how the Baltimore
Yearly Meeting had coped with these issues in the distant past:

In the spring of 1776 Baltimore Yearly
Meeting added to the Queries: ‘Do you bear a faithful testimony against
bearing arms, military services, or contributing to the support of
war?’ (italics ours). In 1781 the Yearly
Meeting recorded: “Most Friends appear to be careful in maintaining our
testimony against war by refusing the payment of taxes.”

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